Static-Dynamic Co-Teaching for Class-Incremental 3D Object Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces SDCoT, a novel static-dynamic co-teaching method for class-incremental 3D object detection that mitigates catastrophic forgetting by combining static and dynamic teachers to preserve old knowledge while learning new classes.

Contribution

The paper presents the first solution for class-incremental 3D object detection, leveraging static and dynamic teachers to improve continual learning performance.

Findings

SDCoT outperforms baseline methods on benchmark datasets.

It effectively reduces catastrophic forgetting in incremental learning.

The approach demonstrates robustness across different scenarios.

Abstract

Deep learning-based approaches have shown remarkable performance in the 3D object detection task. However, they suffer from a catastrophic performance drop on the originally trained classes when incrementally learning new classes without revisiting the old data. This "catastrophic forgetting" phenomenon impedes the deployment of 3D object detection approaches in real-world scenarios, where continuous learning systems are needed. In this paper, we study the unexplored yet important class-incremental 3D object detection problem and present the first solution - SDCoT, a novel static-dynamic co-teaching method. Our SDCoT alleviates the catastrophic forgetting of old classes via a static teacher, which provides pseudo annotations for old classes in the new samples and regularizes the current model by extracting previous knowledge with a distillation loss. At the same time, SDCoT consistently learns the underlying knowledge from new data via a dynamic teacher. We conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets and demonstrate the superior performance of our SDCoT over baseline approaches in several incremental learning scenarios.